Building Your Funding Team – Skills, Structure & Survival
With Stephanie Harfensteller and David Christensen
Check out the episode website
In this episode I’m joined by Stephanie Harfensteller and David Christensen to talk about one of the most difficult and under-discussed challenges in EU funding: how to build a funding team that actually works. Stephanie has been building up an EU funding function at FIR since 2019, while David has been doing something similar inside BOFA on Bornholm. From very different organisational settings, they describe a remarkably similar reality: a strong funding unit is not just a service desk for forms and deadlines. It needs to support proposal development, project execution and long-term networking and positioning — and in smaller organisations, the same people often need to move across all of those roles.
From there we dig into the real difficulties: how to identify the right skills, how to recruit people when profiles are hard to find, how to train juniors without losing all the knowledge when they move on, and how to create some form of knowledge management when most of the most important know-how still sits in people’s heads. We also talk about management commitment, public perception, long-term vision, the pain of falling proposal success rates, and the need to balance patience with pressure. It’s a very honest conversation for anyone trying to professionalise funding work inside an organisation without the luxury of a large specialist department.
Time codes:
01:48 Guest introduction and fly in
07:01 What Is a Good Funding Support Unit?
18:08 The Skills Question
28:28 Building the Team in Reality
40:05 Keeping Knowledge in the Organisation
50:45 Working Under Organisational Constraints
01:06:07 Reflections and advice
01:10:24 The toughest challenge
